Riding the social networks wave

This wave hasn’t crested — it really is the next big thing — but who knows where it will all lead? Can Microsoft and Yahoo jump in? Fortune’s David Kirkpatrick explores the next phases.
[Here is quote from the introduction.] The reason social networking matters is simple: people do things together, and this new software promises us the means to engage the social aspect of our lives in everything we do online. Among other things, shopping, consuming media, researching, planning our time, and of course communicating can all be done more efficiently if we have manageable information about what our friends are doing. It goes way beyond high school and college kids sharing photos and exchanging gossip.
Source: David Kirkpatrick, Fortune, August 24, 2007

Library school to lead team that will preserve virtual worlds

With help from the Library of Congress, and in partnership with three other institutions of higher education and one commercial game lab, a team from Illinois’ Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) will lead a two-year project to preserve virtual worlds – early video games, electronic literature and “Second Life,” an interactive multiplayer game.
Source: Andrea Lynn, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, August 21, 2007

Search Google or Yahoo, send directions to your Mercedes-Benz

Starting next week, some Mercedes-Benz drivers will be able to plan trips to restaurants, stores and landmarks using Yahoo or Google, and then send directions directly to their vehicles. The program, announced Wednesday, is called Search & Send.
Drivers can plot destinations, addresses or points of interest using Google Maps or Yahoo Local Maps. Then, they can click a “Send to Car” icon. The information is then sent to the vehicle’s GPS navigation system and can be retrieved by pushing a dashboard button on the car’s Tele Aid telematics system.
Source: Matt Nauman, Mercury News, August 29, 2007

Are drivers ready for high-tech onslaught?

Self-parking, auto-braking, always-connected cars will soon be the norm as James Bond-like high-tech gear trickles down from luxury models to budget rides in 2008. But without one’s own personal Q to explain how each gadget works, how much new tech is too much for the average consumer to handle?
“A lot of it is beneficial…But it can be confusing and in the automobile, that’s a safety threat,” said Don Norman, professor at Northwestern University, author of The Design of Future Things and co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, a company that consults with major manufacturers on the design of everything from Web sites to car computers.
Source: Candace Lombardi, CNET News.com, August 28, 2007

C.U. Researcher Develops Info Sharing Application

Fedora Commons, an open-source software application, hopes to revolutionize the way scholars, institutions, and libraries share information. With a recent grant of $4.9 million from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Sandy Payette, a founder and co-director of Fedora Commons and researcher for Cornell’s Computer Science Department, hopes to further build an online system that fosters open collaboration between software developers and web site designers that can be used as a template for storing and preserving different types of data.
Source: Elizabeth Manapsal, The Cornell Daily Sun, August 29, 2007

Metasearch Engine Digs Deeper, Faster for News

Are you getting all the news you need from Internet search engines that you use to find the latest headlines? Maybe not, said University of Illinois at Chicago computer science professor Clement Yu, who has devised software that finds a world of news stories that big search engines either overlook or do not deliver in a timely manner.
[Note: The site, AllInOneNews, directs user queries to some 1,800 news search engines based in about 200 countries and territories.]
Source: University of Illinois at Chicago news release, August 22, 2007

At Rapleaf, your personals are public

In the cozy Facebook social network, it’s easy to have a sense of privacy among friends and business acquaintances. But sites like Rapleaf will quickly jar you awake: Everything you say or do on a social network could be fair game to sell to marketers. Rapleaf, based in San Francisco, is building a business on that premise.
The privately held start-up, whose investors include Facebook-backer and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, runs two consumer Web sites: Rapleaf.com, a people search engine that lets you retrieve the name, age and social-network affiliations of anyone, as long as you have his or her e-mail address; and Upscoop.com, a similar site to discover, en masse, which social networks to which the people in your contact list belong. To use Upscoop, you must first give the site the username and password of your e-mail account at Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo or AOL. By collecting these e-mail addresses, Rapleaf has already amassed a database of 50 million profiles.
Source: Stefanie Olsen, CNET News.com, August 31, 2007

Wikipedia aims to roll over Google

Jimmy Wales plans to apply Wikipedia’s experience to internet search. In December, he will launch Wikia Search, a search engine to compete with giants such as Google and Yahoo. The project could prove even more controversial than Wikipedia. “Somebody said to me, your reputation is assured with Wikipedia; this could be a big failure. Why take the risk? But I don’t even think in those terms. Search is something lots of people are concerned about and we can make a change,” said Wales.
Again Wikia will attempt to harness the knowledge of people around the world. Google, Yahoo and their rivals fiercely guard the secrets of their search engines. Wikia’s search programs will be open for anyone to edit if they have sufficient pro-gramming knowledge. Users will also rank websites in the hope of arriving at the best possible combination of human and computer ranking of searches.
Source: Dominic Rushe, The Sunday Times, UK, September 2, 2007